A Vampyre Story lives! Bill Tiller and Šarūnas Ledas share A Bat's Tale

• Interviews by Jack Allin
• Published:

The thing about vampires is, no matter what you do them (garlic, crosses and wooden stakes excepted), they just keep coming back. But for the longest time it seemed that might NOT happen with A Vampyre Story, the charming 2008 supernatural comedy by Bill Tiller’s Autumn Moon Entertainment. When last we saw would-be opera singer-turned-vampiress Mona De Lafitte, she was leaving Draxylvania behind to continue pursuing her career in Paris, along with her wisecracking bat pal Froderick. Unless, of course, her captor and tormentor Shrowdy managed to stop her, and it certainly appeared that was his intent. So whatever happened to Mona? We never found out! Despite numerous attempts to resume the series, various licensing and financial issues prevented a sequel from ever being made.

Until now.

We’re thrilled to share the announcement that Bill will be teaming up with Tag of Joy, the upstart Lithuanian developer behind the delightful Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit to make A Vampyre Story: A Bat’s Tale and continue the tale of Mona and Froderick at long last. But where, when, how? You’ve got questions, we’ve got questions, so who better to ask than Bill Tiller and Tag of Joy’s co-founder Šarūnas Ledas themselves? Read on for a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how this project came to be, and what’s in store in this stunning, long-awaited point-and-click sequel. 

Bill! It’s been far too long. Great to have you with us here at Adventure Game Hotspot. And Šarūnas, it’s always a pleasure, though you probably hear from me more often than you’d like. But today we’re here for a reason that makes all of us excited: the very real chance of making A Vampyre Story: A Bat's Tale a reality. Wow! 

Bill: Hi Jack. Good to be talking with you again. Sorry for the delay. Getting big projects like this off the ground takes too long, unfortunately. But we have what we need and so we are kicking development into high gear! I am so excited to be back working on A Vampyre Story: A Bat’s Tale, especially with Šarūnas and Žilvinas and the rest of the Tag of Joy team. They are super talented and a dream to work with.

Šarūnas: Always a pleasure for me too! Really glad that the adventure gamer and developer community is so friendly, and Adventure Game Hotspot plays a big role in it, so it’s an honor to be here. It’s also super fun to talk about our new game and the exciting collaboration with Bill and Autumn Moon.

We’ll dig deep into that game shortly, but first, let’s catch up on where everyone is at. Bill, the last time most adventure gamers heard from you was all the way back in 2016 with Duke Grabowski, Mighty Swashbuckler! What have you been up to? 

Bill: I have been working on a lot of things actually, mostly on what I would basically call a ‘tabletop graphic adventure’ called The Shivers and the expansion pack with Pop Fiction Games, whom I am a part owner of. It was started by Andy Logan, who was a big LucasArts adventure game fan. He combined pop-up books, Betrayal on Haunted Hill, and LucasArts adventure game puzzles into a fun pop-up board game. All the rooms are modular and fold open like a pop-up book or card, and they are then magnetically stuck together to form different layouts unique to each individual story. I painted all the sets and most of the characters. Even Larry Ahern of Full Throttle and The Curse of Monkey Island fame wrote some of the scenarios. I highly recommend fans of adventure games or my art to check it out.  

I have also done three children’s books for a doctor and a therapist who works with children on the spectrum. And I am working on three of my own children’s books, one of which is about a little girl who wants to play with monster friends, but they don’t act the way she expected and inevitably things go awry. It’s called Scary Mary’s Monster Mess. I am currently looking for a publisher. I also bought back the A Vampyre Story rights from Crimson Cow – thank you, Georg Hach – and found a new publisher, Jordan Freeman and Zoom Platform, who helped get the original game back on Steam and running on modern PCs.

Šarūnas, hard to believe it’s been over two years since the launch of your own great debut, Crowns and Pawns. What have you and the team been busy working on since then?

Šarūnas: After the initial PC release in 2022, we (Tag of Joy) worked on consoles and released the Nintendo Switch version last year. For that we finalized and polished the gamepad controls (which you can use on PC too) with the player controlling the main character directly, which I think ended up being quite immersive.

We’ve also spent some time working on a couple of new super early stage games, one of which we have just announced –  A Vampyre Story: A Bat's Tale (super hyped that we can finally talk about it). While working on Crowns and Pawns, we gained a lot of experience and developed some tech, which we are really keen on applying to our new projects!

So we have a pair of talented game developers on opposite sides of the globe, both looking for a great new project to work on. How did the two of you end up together and talking about a possible collaboration? 

Šarūnas: Well, my brother Žilvinas and I (the two co-founders of Tag of Joy) grew up, or rather came of age with games like The Curse of Monkey Island. And when we started following the industry deeper, Bill Tiller was always one of the people whose activities and projects I would regularly check. So at some point Bill posted a very open-ended message about the AVS IP and that he’d like to do something new with it. We reached out, he replied, and here we are! We kept it a bit secret for a while, though (which was pretty tough!), until we were sure we are doing this full-speed.

Bill: When Crimson Cow gave me the opportunity to buy A Vampyre Story rights back, I jumped at the chance! But I didn’t have a team set up or the funding yet. I am no programmer, so I thought maybe fans of my games and also knew how to make graphic adventures might be interested in teaming up on a demo for the game, and then we’d use the demo to raise money for the full game. Tag of Joy turned out to be a perfect match! It was really serendipitous.

Bill, you’ve been wanting to make a new game in the AVS series for a long time. I know you tried Germany a couple times; who knew you just needed to go a couple countries further east. 

Bill: Well, I just really was waiting on what Crimson Cow was doing with the series. They for sure tried to get AVS:ABT funded but whenever we got close, something would come up that stopped the production. So I appreciate the effort they went through but I am glad they ultimately decided to let me buy it and back see if I could get it done. I did get to go to Lithuania for a games conference and had a great time and I hope to go back. It really has a great gaming and game development community, and I was really impressed with how much the folks there love games and game development. Lithuania always had a great reputation in the game industry, so I am not that surprised that I’d be partnering with a team from Vilnius. Seems kind of like a natural pairing.

Šarūnas: Thanks, Bill! I also want to emphasize the fact that the world has become so global that it doesn’t matter where people are that much, and remote collaboration has become a complete norm. There are plenty of tools to make it work too, so I would say we live in an exciting time that opens new opportunities.

In some ways it seems like only yesterday, but really it’s been sixteen years since A Vampyre Story! YIKES! Where does the time go?! 

Bill: I think the great recession really threw a monkey wrench into our long-term plans for the A Vampyre Story series. For those who missed it, watch The Big Short to get the gist. Basically, unemployment and interest rates shot through the roof, so folks weren’t buying games at nearly the same pace as they had been, thus investors held on to their money. It became tough to get funding for the next game in the series. The Crimson Cow folks tried for sure. Plus back then the tech was very expensive to create from scratch, but now with today’s production tools and game engines, game development has become much faster, cheaper, and way better. I learned that when making Duke Grabowski, Mighty Swashbuckler! But I never gave up on making more A Vampyre Story games. I even tried to get a short prequel funded through Kickstarter before we were successful getting Duke Grabowski funded. But with A Vampyre Story: A Bat’s Tale I wanted it to be a traditionally developed game, which is why I held out until we got the funding I think the game deserves.

Why, after all this time, A Vampyre Story: A Bat's Tale? Why not a Duke Grabowski sequel, a Ghost Pirates sequel, or even an original story? Why is it important to you to return to Draxsylvania and the world of Mona and Froderick? 

Bill: Well, like The Empire Strikes Back it purposely ended on a cliffhanger and I wanted to tell the rest of the story. I do have designs for Ghost Pirates and Duke Grabowski but those stories end on satisfactory notes, though clearly some story elements were left hanging so that we could pick up on those threads for the sequels. But A Vampyre Story: A Bat’s Tale had been deep in preproduction at the time and a production plan was all ready to go. We have to rework the preproduction now to fit the new design, engine and upgraded graphics. But it felt to me like a game that was ready to hit the ground running and kind of got ‘strangled in the crib’ so to speak. 

Mona and Froderick are very popular characters, as can be seen by movies like Monster Family 1 & 2, and the Geronimo Stilton Creepella von Cacklefur books. And the amazing amount of really great fan art, though some of it is a little inappropriate and not safe for work. (Stop drawing Mona nude! She really wouldn’t like it. Froderick wouldn’t mind, so have at it.) So I think there are a lot of folks out there who really want to see Mona and Froderick back in action because they are so much fun, plus I love them and I love telling their story. I think fans pick up on that and appreciate it. 

As you said, Bill, the first game ended on a cliffhanger, so we’re still waiting for a resolution. Is it still the plan to pick up the new game where the first one left off? 

Bill: Yep, pretty much 24 hours later, the very next night. The vampire ghost, Baron Shrowdy, being the obsessive narcissist that he is, couldn’t stand the fact that Mona would dare to escape him. Out of desperation, Shrowdy tricked Mona into going to Dr. Mortus’s lair at Mortus Labs™ where he knew the ‘good’ doctor wouldn’t be able to resist experimenting on a new monster. Shrowdy knows Dr. Mortus collects a wide variety of monsters and likes to see what makes them tick. Mona will have to go back to Castle Warg if she wants Shrowdy to free her, or she can rebuke him again and be destroyed during Dr. Mortus’s experiments. It will be up to Froderick in the first half of the game to stop the evil doctor’s nefarious plans and free Mona and a few of Mortus’s other ‘guests.’

It’s all a big homage to the Universal Monster movies of the 40s and 50s, movies I used to watch all the time on the Saturday afternoon Creature Features when I was a kid. It’s got a water-powered mad scientist laboratory, a hunchback, a huge man-made monster, and even a werewolf. We see a return of the sorceress Madame Strigoi, and Jack the Ripper-like night stalker, a midnight trip to an insane asylum, and a stage magician known as the Not-so-great Fauxdini. We are trying to pack in as many gothic horror tropes as we can, which we think will make the game a lot of fun. Hopefully fans will too!

Sounds like a hoot! At one point it looked like a prequel, Year One, would be the next installment in the A Vampyre Story saga, but that wasn’t meant to be. Did you consider possibly starting there? Is that still an option down the line? 

Bill: Well, we had spent so much time and money on our A Vampyre Story: Year One Kickstarter video – which I am very proud of – we really didn’t have much left to keep the campaign going after the initial launch. We kind of put our ‘eggs in one basket’ so to speak. We did the opposite with Duke Grabowski, where we focused on a sustained 60-day campaign and that worked out successfully. It absolutely is still an option, considering much of the game is actually done and the game design document was thoroughly complete. I may even add a variation of puzzle from the game into this one. But it is not at all something I am thinking about. I am 100% focused on A Bat’s Tale and telling the story of how Mona gets back to Paris and relaunches her opera career, which was tragically cut off just as it was starting. We are telling that story first. But once that is done, there are a lot more A Vampyre Story ‘stories’ to tell.

Yes, you’ve previously outlined ideas for as many as four AVS games. Have your ideas changed at all, perhaps to accommodate the difficulty of getting four games made, when even getting two made has proven such an obstacle? 

Bill: I don’t want to have any more cliffhangers, for sure, but we will leave some threads left hanging so we can develop them for any possible next game. But Mona’s odyssey is much like Ulysses’, which is she wants to get her old life back. Mona had her career all carefully mapped out ever since she was a kid, and she is very determined not to let the villains of her world stop her. Each game will be about her overcoming a short-term obstacle that will help her reach her final goal. The first game was about escaping her tormentor and her prison, then learning how to deal with her new ‘condition.’ And this game is about using her and Froderick’s skills to help others, and to learn that her condition is going to require help. So each game we want to be a standalone story, but they are progressive steps on her ultimate quest to return to normal.

How do you envision the distribution of responsibilities for a shared game? Will you be very hands-on, Bill, or more in an advisory, consultancy role? 

Bill: We are sharing the development duties 50/50. Autumn Moon will focus on our core competency, the creative side, with a lot of input and ideas from Tag of Joy. And they are going to focus more on the technical and business side, with some of our input, though we don’t program so I am wisely very hands-off there. We have been working together for a while now and we got our process and working relations working very well. It’s been honestly great, and very smooth.

Šarūnas: Personally, I love this collaboration, because both sides are very hands-on, and it wouldn’t be as fun if Bill wasn’t actually doing what he does best. It’s an equal partnership in many regards – workload distribution, creative control, etc. Of course, it’s still Bill’s concept and story, but both sides share ideas and feedback with each other on all aspects of the game. Naturally, though, there are some areas that each side covers more, as Bill mentioned. Bill and Dave Harris are the lead writers/designers, and Bill is obviously the lead background artist. From our side, we bring the tech and framework, and so we set up the scenes and script the logic too. And then we share other responsibilities: e. g. Bill makes sketches and storyboards, we make 3D models and animations for the characters, and so on.

Šarūnas, your team has certainly proven your chops with Crowns and Pawns, and there are some obvious similarities between the two games. But there are differences as well. What makes you sure A Vampyre Story is a good fit for Tag of Joy? 

Šarūnas: Well, first of all, even though Crowns and Pawns isn’t a comedy game, we do love comedy games too! I think stories like Broken Sword (main inspiration for Crowns and Pawns) are very captivating, but I also consider The Curse of Monkey Island to be one of the best games ever made – it’s close to perfection in all aspects.

Bill: Except for the ending – I blame Jack Soreneson. If he’d given us just six more weeks, we would have had the ‘Walking the Plank of Love’ dance sequence all animated and done! Grumble, grumble.

Šarūnas: Haha, well, the ending was a bit rushed, but still not bad! And other than that, the game is really, really fun.

But, anyway, A Vampyre Story also makes a lot of sense, because technologically it’s extremely similar to Crowns and Pawns: both are 2.5D, which means that they have 2D painted backgrounds and 3D characters/effects. We learned a lot of lessons, which apply perfectly to A Vampyre Story: A Bat's Tale.

It’s actually funny that when I was finishing the work on the fan-made Broken Sword 2.5, so around 2008-2010, my brother and I started thinking of new projects that we could make together. “2D or 3D” was an important question – both worlds have pros and cons. We kind of wanted the beauty of hand-painted 2D art, but with the advantages that 3D brings, which is variety in camera angles, character animation, etc. So we started thinking about a 2.5D game, but weren’t sure if it can look good. But A Vampyre Story showed very convincing proof that it can! So years later we made Crowns and Pawns in 2.5D because of that and, guess what, now we’re working on A Vampyre Story. So, we’ve kind of come full circle: AVS inspired the tech behind Crowns and Pawns, and because of this tech, we started the collaboration with Bill.

In comparison with the first AVS game, though, we have more elaborate 3D scenes recreated from 2D paintings, which lets us have a nice parallax effect, real-time shadows and more. I believe (and hope) that this makes our games – and in this case Bill’s art – look even more appealing and beautiful!

If the early artwork you’ve shown is any indication, it certainly does! Bill, has the evolution of technology or the genre since the first game impacted your design philosophy at all for A Bat's Tale?

Bill: No, not too much. The new GUI (graphical user interface) has made things much simpler. I have less opportunity to add in my dad jokes and groan-inducing puns. Some would say that is a good thing and those people I call fun-hating critics. But it means less extraneous writing. The puzzles haven’t changed too much because of the switch over…yet. Once we get it all wired up, I am sure we will play it through a bunch and find places where we need to rework things so the gameplay is smoother, but so far no problems. Check in with me in six months and I may have a different answer. But currently we have no issues. Plus I am happy to make the GUI in the style that modern game players expect and are used to. I don’t want the GUI to be an obstacle to enjoying the game. The current one is much cleaner and simpler, which make sense why it is so popular. Even the last Monkey Island game used it. So I am very happy with it.

Šarūnas: Yeah, we switched to a two-action menu, where one action is usually “inspect” and the other one is “interact/talk/pick up.” Personally, I loved the verb coin interface back in the day, but we did a lot of research while working on Crowns and Pawns, and many newer adventure games have turned towards the left-click/right-click interface. So we decided to do so in the new A Vampyre Story game too.

Smart move, I’d say, but I’ll miss the puns! Any new and interesting features in A Bat's Tale that you can tease at this point? 

Šarūnas: I will take this, since I’m really excited about how nice this game is coming along! The gameplay is still quite traditional, but there are many fields where we innovate or iterate over. So, as we like to say, it’s a modern take on the familiar.

First of all, we’ll have the nice parallax effect on the 2D painted scenes, which makes the experience even more engaging. Then we have the “idea items” in the inventory, introduced in the first A Vampyre Story, which is still kind of innovative and unique. Then we use an animation system which is on par with bigger-budget games: we have layers for different parts of a character – body poses, facial expressions, lip sync. We mix them in real-time, which creates a lot of various combinations, breathing even more life into the characters. And we also want to make the game a cinematic experience, with a lot of close-up shots and animations.

Bill: What he said! So many features we have always wanted to add to our old games at Lucas and Autumn Moon the tech couldn’t handle, but now it is just about sky’s the limit! I love Moore’s Law so much. Bless you, Moore! I really hope to take advantage of all these new capabilities to make the experience so much more fun and appealing. I get excited just thinking about it; I need to go calm down!

Not just yet! Because it’s time for the $64,000 question – and probably a whole lot more than that: How does A Vampyre Story: A Bat's Tale get funded? It’s one thing to have the talent – you surely do – and quite another to pay for it. 

Šarūnas: First of all, this wasn’t a quick process; we were contemplating how to finance the game for a while. But we needed to have some content to be able to pitch it to anyone, which takes time too. The first big step towards financing the project was when we received Creative Europe MEDIA funding, since Tag of Joy is based in the EU. It’s a very nice fund, which has helped make quite a few great narrative games, e. g. some games by Ragnar Tørnquist (creator of The Longest Journey), also Broken Sword: Parzival’s Stone, The Witcher 3, etc. In addition to that, both sides are investing their own time and also money made from previous games. At this point, we are absolutely confident that we can do it, but we’re talking to publishers and investors, whose contribution would help make an even better game (and reach even more fans)!

Bill: Yep, what Šarūnas said. It’s really a combo of those two, that Creative Europe MEDIA fund and our own time and money. And like I said, the tech is so good it is a hell of a lot cheaper to do more, do it better and faster, for way less money.

So if all goes well – I mean, when all goes well – when might we finally get to dive back into the world of A Vampyre Story?

Šarūnas: We are quite early in development, so it’s too soon to say. Hopefully, a couple of years from now, but don’t quote me on that!

Bill: Right now we are in preproduction. Luckily a lot of preproduction had been done ten years ago but all that needs to be redone, improved, and updated. Same with the game design. Dave Harris and I are meeting regularly to go over the old design and update and improve it. Then we will get some old LucasArts buddies of mine to weigh on the design and make changes to improve it. I can’t say who but let me just say it’s people you know, and people I used to work with. Then I will redraw and repaint all the old backgrounds and make a few new locations. All that time Šarūnas and Žilvinas and the rest of Tag of Joy team will be helping too, giving feedback and helping work out how the puzzles will function. Then Dave Harris, who penned 80% of the first game, will be the lead writer and write up the lines with input from Tag of Joy and another writer whom I can’t name yet but it's someone you all know. And I promise there will be less puns, because people are no fun.

I trust this is all reverse psychology to create a groundswell of support for the return of dad jokes after all. But puns or no, this is all very exciting, gentlemen, and encouraging to see such a promising partnership take root. I wish you nothing but the best in making A Vampyre Story: A Bat's Tale, and can’t wait to see what you come up with together! I thank you both for your time, and invite you to share any final words to leave with our readers. 

Bill: Thanks, that means a lot. And I have to say I have a really good feeling about this one – I think it will be special. It feels like the stars have aligned, as if everything is coming together and our patience and careful planning are starting to pay off. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, or I am being too optimistic, but I really do think we are going to make a pretty special game, maybe one for the ages. I hope, anyway!

Šarūnas: Thanks again for having us here. And for the readers: please wishlist the game on Steam and share it with your friends! Every person’s contribution means the world to us. Oh, and join us on social media and Discord if you’d like to see updates or have a chat with us.

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